Tuesday, June 18, 2013

Most of that last week in Guangzhou is a blur.This is partly because it rained a lot
–really rained, like in a tropical climate.So, while the mornings were nice, we were stuck inside most afternoons.Another reason was that Bill was working almost
non-stop to prepare for yet another government audit of his work records.We didn’t mind him working because most of
the family was wiped out, so sitting in the hotel room was not so bad, but it doesn’t
make for great blogging.

On Tuesday, we went to a shopping center near the coast and
The White Swan Hotel (just about every adoptive family stays there while in
Guangzhou).It is being refurbished, so
we were at a local Marriott, but we could visit the shopping centers!The whole complex is on an island that was
once occupied by Great Britain and the stores all had plaques explaining the
year they were built (early 1900’s) and their original purpose (banks,
embassies etc.).It was interesting, but
our kids had no intention of letting us hang out and read plaques.Reilly and Sharon were there with one
purpose:to prepare for tea time.We left China with four distinct Chinese tea
sets (four girls, four tea sets) and seven Chinese dresses, each a different
size (to account for the neighbors).Everything was so cheap, it was hard to say, “no.”

On Wednesday, the whole crew from our hotel went to the “Oath-Taking
Ceremony” at the American Consulate.About a dozen families from our hotel crammed
into a bus and drove to the embassy together.Now that we had both QingBei and ZiXuan, there were eight in our family
and we took up the whole back of the bus.Therefore, I couldn’t really hear the interpreter all that well. She had a soft voice and despite the
microphone, it was a lost cause. Even
the parents in the middle of the bus were making eye contact, trying to see if
anyone else knew what she was saying. I
finally just stopped listening, figuring that eventually I’d get the
information I needed. …This was a mistake.

The American Consulate was on the fourth floor of a
huge building in downtown Guangzhou.Our
interpreter started collecting everyone’s bags in the first floor lobby, so my
kids handed over their backpacks etc. and I thought all was well.What I didn’t hear on the bus was that we
couldn’t take ANYTHING into the Consulate besides our passport and one
bottle/diaper per child.When I got to
the metal detector/scanner on the fourth floor and handed over my fanny pack, the
whole operation came to a grinding halt.Bill ended up collecting my phone, fanny pack and another couples things
(who, it’s only fair to note, were sitting in the front of the bus) and running
back to the first floor to find our interpreter and have her hold it all.Of course, he couldn’t find her and ended up
going to a bank and paying them $20 to hold everything behind their counter. Then, since he wasn’t with our group anymore
and didn’t have an interpreter, the Chinese who were guarding the elevator wouldn’t
let him back onto the fourth floor without a considerably heated
conversation.

He finally found us, only to realize that he was better off
in the lobby.For reasons which are
still unclear, the American officials crammed all of us into a small waiting
room for about half an hour.Just as the
noise was becoming intolerable, an adolescent American came over to the bullet
proof window and had all of us raise our right hand and swear that all the
information on our paperwork was true to the best of our knowledge. That was the Oath-Taking Ceremony. I’m afraid I laughed out loud over this. We’ve
been handing them money and paperwork for over 15 months now and signing the
same oath at the end of every document.If we were going to lie….oh, never mind.We got our kids Visa packets and headed back to the hotel.

On Thursday, we went to a huge park right across the
street.The middle of the park was the
center of the original city.There was a
huge central building/temple and parts of the original city wall.Inside the building there was a museum
including a map of the city with different city walls outlined in lights
showing the city growth over the centuries.It was really cool.It would have
been a great morning if it wasn’t for the Chinese staring at my kids.

At one point, I was planning to climb to the top of yet
another tower with Bill.We left the
kids at the bottom of some outside stairs and thought we’d just run to the top
of the tower and get some pictures.At
the landing, just outside the entrance, I turned around to check on them.They were all huddled in a corner of the
stair way and there were three Chinese men standing well within their personal
space and staring at my kids as though they held some life-changing truth within
their eyes.I rushed back down the
stairs and got between the men and my kids and got them to back off.They went to the other side of the stair
way, but they were still staring at us for the next several minutes and even
followed us as we walked to the park exit.

I’m afraid this left us all pretty jaded.They had used up our last bit of patience
with staring Chinese.So, a few minutes
later, when a different Chinese man started walking much too close, all I
wanted to do was dump the full measure of my wrath right on his head.I glanced over at him and gave him a mean
look, but he just kept coming closer.Just as I was about to say something really terrible, since he couldn’t
understand me anyway, he stepped in front of me to catch my eyes and said to me
in English, “You care for Chinese children.You kind person.”

I was so surprised by this, I became totally tongue
tied.Looking back, I should have said
plenty.I know that what he said was a
statement, but he meant it as a question.I could tell by the tone of his voice.And, here’s the thing;I’m a
Jesus Freak.There is a very specific
reason why I care for Chinese children and it is NOT because I am a kind
person.In fact, what seems like an act
of kindness to the outside world is really an act of selfishness on my part,
but I don’t have much success convincing people of this.I care for Chinese children because the same
God who created the universe and sent His only Son to atone for my sins is,
occasionally, very clear about how I might bring Him glory.At the moment, my brain was reeling over the
fact that bringing God glory does not include mouthing off to innocent Chinese
who are so surprised by what they perceive as selfless love, they will follow a
family across a city park to try to understand more.I was having a really hard time switching
gears.I knew what NOT to say, which is
pretty good for me, but I didn’t have any idea what I should say.We talked for a minute about how he learned
such good English and how we will fix QingBei’s face, then we parted ways.…I missed my chance.I’m still annoyed with myself over this.

Anyway, we walked well over three miles that morning, all of
it uphill, and took the subway back to the hotel.Everyone collapsed that afternoon and we
spent the evening packing for the trip home on Friday.

Monday, June 3, 2013

We are exactly 12 hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time here.As I write this it is 5am, Tuesday morning,
but it’s 5pm, Monday afternoon at home.We have three more days here (T, W and
Th).Friday, we fly to Beijing and then
to Dulles (in VA).Because of the time
zones, that last flight will take approximately one hour, since we will leave
Beijing at 7pm China time and arrive in the states at 8pm EST on that same
Friday(oh, the complications of living
on a sphere).

Anyway, when we adopted in Costa Rica and Ukraine,
everything was topsy turvy.You never
knew what was going to happen next.We
planned to stay for about two weeks in each country and we were in Costa Rica for a
month and in Ukraine for two months.At
any time, an official may or may not want to meet this week, or show up for his/her
appointment, or sign your adoption papers etc. etc.Here in China, we are enjoying the opposite
experience. Everything is happening
according to an iron-clad agenda. There
are Americans everywhere, all adopting Chinese kids and all going through the
same assembly-line-type week.We’ve made
friends with a bunch of families who are not even using the same adoption agency
or staying in the same hotel as us, but we see them everywhere since everyone’s
on the same schedule.

All the days here are essentially the same.We wake early and send Bill off to exercise.Then we all hit the breakfast buffet in the
hotel (and try not to stuff ourselves) and meet about five other families for
morning touring.We come back about noon
for lunch in our hotel room and naptime, then we wander around the city looking
for a restaurant that is both clean and affordable for dinner.By the time we get back to our hotel, it’s
usually time for bed.The few variations
that get thrown in here are Bill lugging me along to exercise with him, trips
to wal-mart, swimming in the hotel pool or doing laundry in the hotel
bathtub.

On Sunday, our tour was to a local Buddhist temple. It was a
500 year old temple made of four large buildings surrounding a well-kept
courtyard.It was essentially a tourist
trap.Each building held a different
kind of Chinese craft for sale: calligraphy, silk, embroidery, jewelry, painted
bowls etc. etc.It was a comical mix of
old architecture and new capitalism.

This was my favorite photo of the day. It’s a soda machine that is at the end of a corridor between two of the buildings.Such scenes make me happy.I don’t know why.

After the temple, we hit a sort of shopping mall that sold
jewelry.It was huge, four stories high
and just rows and rows of jewelry.I’m
not into jewelry, so we went to McDonalds.

This is just one wall of a pearl store. It had three walls like this and there were at least twenty similar stores.

On Monday, we went to another Buddhist temple that was
actually a temple.I didn’t know this,
but there are many Buddahs, each with his own purpose, so this was many buildings
filled with many different Buddahs.

At the last building, there was a Buddhist
priest available to bless the children.We declined.I can’t help
getting annoyed at stuff like this.Buddhism
is the largest religion in China and these people are the ones who were
planning to essentially neglect my babies during their formative years, if not
longer, and you think I want a religious leader from such a culture to give my
child a blessing?

After that, we went to a spice market. This was also huge, but rather than a multi-story
mall, it was just rows and rows of city streets filled with little shops of
spices and pots and …bugs.

We spent the
morning looking for a deep fried scorpion for Paul to eat (I’m going to spare
you my thoughts on the Bucket lists of 14 year old boys).We failed at this.All we found were live scorpions.ZiXuan, who wanted me to carry her the whole
time, saw a huge vat of scorpions and wanted down.She went right over to them.If I hadn’t grabbed her, I think she would have
put her hand right into the bowl.

Both days, we came back to the hotel about 1:00 and napped until dinner time.The heat here just sucks the life out of
us.It’s in the 90’s which wouldn’t be
horrible, but the humidity is stifling and by the time we get back to the
hotel, everyone hits the hay for at least two hours.We usually eat out at a local restaurant. Sunday night, we hit a popular Chinese spot. It was jam packed and, honestly, the food was great, but the staring at QingBei is just so hard to endure, we went to an American Coffee Shop Monday night. This is ZiXuan, discovering ketchup.

We are in another ridiculously opulent five star hotel.I just have to say a few words about this
place, because it begs for commentary.Many of the hotels we stay at have been near shopping malls.This one is on top of its own shopping mall
and that is on top of a subway station.I say, “it’s own mall” because all of the walls in this hotel are marble
and the walls of the adjoining mall are matching marble.Plus, there are advertisements and signs
pointing to the different stores/restaurants between the mall and the hotel.This place is so fancy, it’s laughable.It’s like some wealthy benefactor had nothing
better to do with his money so he stopped by one day and vomited opulence
twenty stories high.Everything is
either marble, or glass, or mirrored or carved.The best part is the hotel room itself.The bathroom has NO WALLS.It’s
all glass windows.I can stand at my bed
and look through a glass window into the bathtub/shower, through another glass
wall into the sink/toilet area (am I the only person in China who feels a need
for bran cereal and a little bit of drywall?) .Even better, there is a blind that comes down (remote control) on the
outside of the glass window—the bedroom side.It took my kids five minutes to figure out how to lower the blinds and
three milliseconds to figure out how to push the blinds aside and void any
thought of privacy for the next week.

Saturday morning, we took the clan down to the second floor
for the plethora of breakfast items in the next buffet.This one covers about twice the square feet
of last weeks buffet, but I couldn’t see too much of it because I was covered
in children.QingBei now insists on
sitting next to me at meals and ZiXuan is in my lap almost all the time.I realize this is ridiculous, but everything
in their little lives is so unstable right now, there is no way I am going to
add to their stress.This is the third
hotel we have been in with QingBei and the second with ZiXuan.The upshot was that I sat with the girls and
my other kids brought us breakfast items and tried to describe, with wild eyes,
the choices they were forced to make that morning (we make them finish their
plates, so they have to be prudent).

After breakfast, we met three other adoptive families to get
our Chinese babies a medical checkup for the American Consulate.Every Saturday, at this same medical center, they
have a sort of all-day clinic for adoptive parents.There must have been fifty families there,
all hugging terrified Chinese toddlers and going from station to station to get
their babies checked out.It was
essentially un-eventful, except that both QingBei and ZiXuan wanted me to hold
them, which was a little tricky, and the last station required a blood sample.

Of course, the Chinese would not let the
parents go into the room while they took the sample, so we had to hand them off
to perfect strangers and stand outside a closed, locked door and listen to the
screams.It was awful.We had to wait in line for about thirty
minutes and each child that went in that room came out traumatized and crying.My girls were terrified and the closer we got
to the door, the closer they wanted to be held.I finally just sat down on the
floor for the last ten minutes while I drilled my tour guide about all the
different ways/reasons they might let me go in that room with my babies so I
wouldn’t have to send them in alone.This was pointless.There was no
way they were going to let me in that room.ZiXuan came out crying and QingBei was just hysterical.

After the clinic, the rest of our tour group went to Wal
Mart, but I took the girls back to our hotel for a nap.

The morning was awful, but the evening was wonderful.A few years ago, we were a host family for a
Chinese college student named Luyi.She
didn’t live with us, but we met her often throughout the year and we love her!At the end of the year, she moved back to China
and is now married and working in Hong Kong.She and her husband, Lu, came to visit and we had a wonderful time! After
three weeks being surrounded by strangers, I was surprised at how comforting it
was to see a familiar face!They
showered us with traditional Chinese presents.They brought a bunch of traditional toys for the kids, a beautiful set
of celadon bowls from their wedding and some traditional Chinese snack
food.ZiXuan went right for the dried
shredded squid and QingBei was right behind her.

We were all sitting in our hotel room, enjoying each-others
company, when QingBei suddenly took a good look at them, realized they were
Chinese and had a total melt down.She
has no “roof” to her mouth and her mouth/lip muscles are not really functional,
so it is hard to understand her speech, but Lu was able to glean that she was
saying, “I want to stay.” Poor Baby,
somehow she had the idea that because they are Chinese, they were here to take
her away.I was glad that she was sad at
the thought of leaving us, but it did make the evening a little tricky, because
she had me in an unrelenting vice grip for the next five hours.Luckily, ZiXuan, who will not go anywhere
near Bill or Matt, went right over to Lu!So, he carried ZiXuan and I carried QingBei for the rest of the evening.

We hung out with them for as long as we could, but they had
to leave at 9am the next morning to catch the train back to Hong Kong.It’s so nice to see the people I love happily
married and thriving.We will miss them!

Saturday, June 1, 2013

Thursday was another free day (no adoption paperwork, just
hanging out).Bill and I have walked/ran
to the North, West and East of our hotel this week.It is mostly city streets, street vendors and
mopeds as far as the eye can see.There
have been a few parks, but they are so smelly, we have avoided them.Thursday morning, our interpreter took us south
of the hotel.Not two blocks from our hotel, there is a gorgeous park that is CLEAN with a huge lake, a handful of
gazebos, a playground, sand pit, roller blade park, swimming pool (not filled,
but still there), amusement park (complete with carnival rides and rigged games with cheeze prizes) and a military style lazer tag set
up on the top of a hill.Plus, there are
cement walkways all around the lake, plenty wide with no-cars-allowed and, it’s
not stinky.I asked the tour guide if he
could think of any other time before the last day here that he might have
mentioned this.AAAhhh!!Honestly, it wouldn’t have mattered much
because we’ve been busy most mornings and it has rained most afternoons, but
still—we could have run there, rather than the city streets.It’s just beautiful.

I thought I should give an update on QingBei, since she was
so antagonistic toward me earlier this week.She would not come anywhere near me, wouldn’t hold my hand and would not
even look at me most of the time.We
started off battling this earlier in the week by getting her UN-attached from
Reilly.Most of my kids are addicted to
screens—TV screens, Nintendo DS screens, computer screens – except for Reilly,
who just loves babies and toddlers.The
other kids like QingBei, but they don’t have the patience to play four-year-old
games for hours on end, so they interact with her for a few minutes, until they
get bored and then they ignore her. So, whenever we had free time, it was
always Reilly playing with QingBei and the other kids on screens.It was no wonder QingBei became attached to
her.I finally told Reilly that she
really had to find something else to do and stop spending all her free time
with QingBei.Reilly was great about
this and has really backed off.Of
course, rather than play with me, QingBei drifted toward every other family
member besides me over the course of the week. I looked for a chance to move in, but she really wanted
nothing to do with me.

This changed a little when ZiXuan arrived on Monday.QingBei started walking over to me, mostly to
hand ZiXuan things, but at least she was getting close.She also started playing with me more.She loves to play tickle monster and hide and
seek.In fact, she is always playing
tickle monster.She greets people by
tickling their belly and giving them a playful growl (we’ll work on this
later).I would try to tickle her a few
times each day, but she always turned her head and pushed my hand away.Over time, she tolerated me more and more,
but didn’t really acknowledge my existence until Wednesday at the park. As I wrote, she walked right up to me and held my hand as
we were walking to the tower.This was
huge.It was also painful, because I was
carrying ZiXuan (380 steps total to the top of that stinkin tower), and there
was no way I was going to let go of QingBei to switch hands.Luckily, Matt stepped in and carried her so I
could finally switch ZiXuan to my other arm.If only there were triathlon –type sporting events involving
baby-juggling, I might have a chance to place!

Sometime during that walk in the park on Thursday, something clicked and suddenly, QingBei was on me like white on rice. It would have been wonderful, but rather than just hold my hand, she wanted me to carry her and I was already carrying ZiXuan. The result was that I would end up finding some steps somewhere so I could hold them both on my lap until QingBei was ready to move off again, but on that day, I officially became the mother to two new babies, one that I carry and one who holds my hand as she walks.

We
spent the rest of Thursday in the hotel (essentially swimming and bickering)
because of the rain and got ready to fly out on Friday.

We had a free morning on Friday, so Bill got up early to
work out at the fantastic hotel Health Center and I had the morning with
QingBei and ZiXuan.Glory of Glories, QingBei
woke up calling, “ma-ma” for the first time.She also let me take her out of the crib and stuck by me for most of the
day.When I left about 11am to go
running, I had to sneak out and when I came back, she was glad to see me.We left for the airport about 2pm and by then
she had develop an almost neurotic obsession with holding my hand. We flew out at 6:30 and landed at 7:30pm. She sat next to me on the plane and stuck by
me like glue as we drove to the hotel, checked in, and went to a local McDonalds for dinner.

We are now in Guangzhou (at another five star hotel) for a week to
process paperwork for the American Consulate. Now that QingBei has bonded with me, I feel like we are essentially coasting. THANK YOU GOD--and thanks for all of you who were praying for us! At some point, we should probaby get together and discuss the stock market. With results like this, I feel we have a reasonable shot at a cool million.

About Me

Welcome Readers! This blog began as a record of our trip to Ukraine where we adopted two boys in 2010. Since the blogging was getting a little boring over time, we added two girls from China in 2013. To answer the obvious questions; Yes, we have nine kids (eight still at home). Yes, we’d adopt more kids if we could afford it. Yes, our house is a wreck. For the record, our girls do not take ballet, our boys are mediocre at soccer, and none of our children are in the gifted program at school. Nevertheless, God loves us and sent His son to die for our sins!
The blog title is from a poem by W.H. Auden (Finding Atlantis). As soon as I heard the phrase, I thought it perfectly described our schlepp through life. When things fall apart, we remember that we give from a ridiculous spiritual/emotional abundance because we drink from streams of living water that never run dry.